Internal institutional content is commonly handled by knowledge management (KM) systems and content management (CM) systems. Enterprise content affiliated with external customers is commonly managed by customer relationship management (CRM) systems. These systems, in departments within an enterprise, are often incompatible with one another and tend to operate independently from one another (e.g., maintaining separate repositories). Hence, content access tends to be compartmentalized.
Apart from the compartmentalization, these conventional systems only capture a small fraction of knowledge in the employees' heads and the local computers due to lack of incentives to participate in the above-mentioned systems. Particularly, most systems only provide tools to organize and search content within a repository, and lacks logic to implement any incentive structures.
In the enterprise environment today, a great majority of knowledge and content remain unshared and/or compartmentalized (e.g., as personal knowledge, locally stored content, or content limited within a particular department). For example, this valuable knowledge (often referred to as tribal knowledge) can include sales methods (e.g., implemented by a sales department), customer fixes (e.g., implemented by service departments), and creative marketing ideas (e.g., implemented by marketing departments).